Lanús arrived with $9.0M and left with the best player in the building. The board will call it business; the queue at the ticket office will use other words.
He is going to Lanús, the club has $9.0M it did not have on Friday, and the phone-ins have already decided how they feel about that. Selling well and selling somebody they loved are not the same skill.
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.21 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
Iago was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Squad14 Dec 2026
Mario Tajima falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Clubs make promises constantly and the page usually only hears about them when they are broken. This one was honoured, and the dressing room noticed that faster than any supporter did.
Iago was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 7.83 at 33, and nobody on the pitch was better.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Dibba have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Dibba this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
37 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Dibba lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Dibba can pretend not to have heard.
5 without a win now, and the ground has developed the special quiet of a crowd that expects the worst. One scrappy 1-0 would cure most of it; that is the maddening part.
One scored and one made, which is a different afternoon from scoring twice and an easier one to overlook. Marked 7.84, and involved in 2 of his side's goals.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Dibba this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The words a physio says slowly. 45 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Dibba this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad5 Oct 2026
Mario Tajima falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Conceding is one thing; the response is what tells you about a dressing room. Mohanad Ali had Dibba level again within 1 minutes, and Al Nasr never got to play with a lead at all.